Abstract

AIJON OLIVA, Miguel Ángel  and  BORREGO NIETO, Julio. Grammatical variation as form and meaning: The use of verbal clitics in Peninsular Spanish. Lingüística [online]. 2013, vol.29, n.2, pp.93-126. ISSN 2079-312X.

Spanish pronominal clitics, which can be conceived as verbal quasi-morphemes indexing object agreement, do not alternate positions within verbal periphrases in a hazardous way, but depending on the degree of fusion achieved between the verbs as well as on the salience or accessibility of the clitic referent. The latter is conditioned by factors such as grammatical person, animacy, specificity or continuity across discourse; higher salience is associated with a stronger tendency to clitic preposition. The analysis of several corpora of contemporary Spanish shows that this variant is just a choice among others that, together, help create a certain communicative style as the preference for aspectual periphrases, for first- and second-person referents, etc., which explains why they all should tend to co-appear in certain communicative situations, particularly oral and spontaneous ones. The main notion governing the investigation is that syntactic variants are not isolated formal features, but rather a part of more complex patterns of structural as well as conceptual variability and change, which in turn are grounded on general cognitive principles

Keywords : clitics; verbal periphrases; salience; communicative style.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )